become a Wikipedia contributor

this goal used to be to become a wikipedia contributor, which is very hard to define. So I changed it to a to-do item, which would be much easier. I need to:

- register
- identify topics I can contribute to
- I guess the easiest thing I can do is translate into my native language

I use wiki for evrything, might as well give something back

First I have to become a partial expert on some obscure and random topic!

I just haven’t gotten around to doing this yet but I will.

But I spent a year or so stubbing out a bunch of articles and improving and editing others.

I started editing in Wikipedia about 2 years ago, when I tried to find some info on a French bande-dessinée artist and the article was severly lacking. I added and corrected spelling here and there, got an account, cleaned up articles, joined a project, created stubs, added infoboxes and images, used templates, fixed layouts, removed spam and trivia, joined a wiki in another language, and than I just had to stop. I had a watchlist of over 400 articles, checked in almost every day. I had witnessed nasty ‘edit-wars’ and ‘ownership’ issues. People would get so worked up about this stuff, you’d think it was the most important thing in the world for them. And I was becoming one of them. It became too much of a hassle. So I’ve quit.
I still think wikipedia is great. It’s my primary source of info on the web. There are a lot of great people contributing. It was a lot of fun working with it too, I hope my list above is not putting anyone off. It’s not that hard to edit either, even if you’re a coding newbie. But please use your common sense and if you’re not sure about something, ask your questions on the talk pages, that’s what they’re for.

I haven’t written any articles and probably never will, but I have added a few things here and there to existing articles. So far I’ve added Claudine Longet as one of the artists who covered the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows”, and added a note to the Now & Laters article about a mention of them in the Beastie Boys’ song “Get it Together”.

Tiny things, but they sure were fun.

I wrote an article and corrected spelling and grammar mistakes in several articles by others. I’m calling this done.

When a friend visited St. Louis and enthusiastically reported that I would enjoy a bar there called The Flâneur’s Hideout, I thought that was humorous, because my favorite bar in Seattle is called the Hideout (which she knew) and my favorite word of the last year is flâneur (which she did not know). I’m guessing I’ll like the place, if I ever get to St. Louis. But as I was replying to her bar enthusiasm with my word enthusiasm, I realized the Wikipedia page made no mention of the context in which I’d learned and adopted the term flâneur, which was street photography. So I added a few lines about photography to the Wikipedia page...unless somebody deletes them, I am officially a contributor now. I’ve never felt so ensmartenizing.

dont have the time…. its too complicated i think…. not determined enough to find out!